Measure of Success

Bacris · 19th September 2006, 03:33 PM

So being new to e-publishing, when do you all consider a product a "success"? Is it a set number of sales? If it covers its own actual cost, or some other threshold?

The reason I ask is my company, Dreamscarred Press, just released our first PDF and it's hit about 140 sales in the two months it's been out and it's hard to measure its success, as we don't really have any other yardstick...

So when do you all consider a release to be "successful"?

Prest0 · 19th September 2006, 03:37 PM

Generally a 10% return on your investment within a reasonable amount of time is considered a good return. Of course, it's up to you to define "reasonable". And a lot of people don't factor in the value of their own time when figuring their ROI.

All that being said, in today's market 140 PDF sales in two months sounds like quite a successful release.

Urizen · 19th September 2006, 04:05 PM

140 sales seems like a very good realease to me.

Congrats on that. Are most of your sales on enworld?

Bacris · 19th September 2006, 07:37 PM

Thanks for the feedback!

That makes it a little bit easier to figure out just how successful we're being, then.

And actually, the vast majority of our sales (around 90%) were at our own online store before we set up accounts here at ENWorld or at RPGNow. It meant extra workload, as I was the site admin / DBA / co-author / customer service, but we didn't have the initial capital for the accounts.